New York Magazine: How the Fight Over Transgender Kids Got a Leading Sex Researcher Fired

February 8, 2016

From Jesse Singal of NYMag:

“On paper, Dr. Kenneth Zucker isn’t the sort of person who gets suddenly and unceremoniously fired. For decades, the 65-year-old psychologist had led the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic (GIC), in Toronto, one of the most well-known clinics in the world for children and adolescents with gender dysphoria — that is, the feeling that the body they were born with doesn’t fit their true gender identity. Zucker had built up quite a CV during his time leading the clinic: In addition to being one of the most frequently cited names in the research literature on gender dysphoria and gender-identity development, and the editor of the prestigious journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, he took a leading role helping devise diagnostic and treatment guidelines for gender dysphoric and transgender individuals. He headed the group which developed the DSM-5’s criteria for its “gender dysphoria” entry, for example, and also helped write the most recent “standards of care” guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health — one of the bibles for clinicians who treat transgender and gender-dysphoric patients.

An impressive career, yes, but it’s doubtful any of this gave him much comfort on December 15. That was when he was called in from vacation for an 8:30 a.m. meeting with his employer, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), one of the largest mental health and addiction research hospitals in Canada.”

This is hard to read. Trans ideologues are winning, and they are systematically destroying dissidents who are in any position to stand up for common sense with any authority.

Even in this article, look at this statement:

“In 2016, there’s fairly solid agreement about the proper course of treatment for otherwise healthy, stable young people who have persistent gender dysphoria, and who are either approaching puberty or older than that: You help them transition to their true gender.”

So the ‘proper course of treatment’ for a young gender-nonconforming 11 year old is to be dosed up with drugs that will destroy their fertility, physically mutilated, and encouraged to believe falsehoods about their own body? And a person who wants this is ‘otherwise healthy and stable’? This is in a piece that stands out for its willingness to take on the trans ideology.

Yup. The author presents as evenhandedly describing opposing sides of a debate, but is actually just describing factionalism on the pro-gender side. Your son wears dresses all the time, he’s really a girl. Your son wears dresses all the time, you should stop him from doing that because he’s not really a girl. It’s always about the dress because it’s always about femininity as it brands children into the lower gender class, women.

And of course there is how this ideology trashes girls and young women, encouraging them to believe they can escape this gender rule of female inferiority. I read a piece awhile back about a young woman who decided she could be a man and also be prostituted and how it was going so well, all the other prostituted boys accepted her, she finally belonged. Horrifying.

All the way at the end of this article, we arrive at a place that is NOT affirming of the trans ideology: “It’s impossible to know what the treatment course would have been for these children if their parents had started their clinical journeys by going to a gender-affirmative specialist, rather than to the GIC. But Rena, for her part, is positive that the advice would have been for Rachel to transition. “Absolutely,” she said. “It would have cemented who she identified as instead of keeping the door open and allowing her to land in a different place from a maturity perspective, for her to be able to make the choice truly herself. I just think that that would have denied her the opportunity to make that choice.”

It seems as though many parents, clinicians, and others face significant pressure to embrace the gender-affirmative approach these days. According to an influential strain of trans politics, Zucker’s more nuanced, “Why?”-focused method is offensive. This sounds like a caricature, but right there in the External Review that helped get him fired and his clinic shuttered, two professional psychiatrists state that asking “why” is improper. What needs to be done is to accept the child for who they are, and anything less than that is ignorant, if not bigoted.

This places a heavy burden on parents who aren’t sure who their children are, or who don’t accept the notion that a 5-year-old, even an insistent and strong-willed one, has a set identity in the same way adults do. The current politics leave them behind, because their stories don’t fit neatly into the binary in which trans identities are either accepted or rejected, full stop. There’s no natural political grouping for parents of desisters, because desisting isn’t an identity-politics lodestone in the way persisting is. “We’re quieter,” said Amanda of parents of kids whose gender dysphoria desists. “There are a bunch of us scattered around, and we’re not acting collectively.” As Merry put it, “I feel like sometimes there’s no middle ground. You’re either trans or you’re not, and you can’t be this kid who is just kind of exploring.”

But the activists and clinicians celebrating the ouster of Zucker and the shuttering of his clinic are acting collectively, and to them all these questions are really just fronts for transphobia, the seeming complexities have been resolved, and it’s time to move on. “The controversy is over, and at this point we are mopping up the pieces,” said Russell. “There was a controversy. It’s over. They lost.”

When the “External Review” was first published on the CAMH website I did a fairly extensive search on FTM websites and boards looking for iterations of the “hairy vermin” story. This was before the story had been exposed as false- I had been hoping to glean more information about that individual’s experience. I didn’t find any, but what I did find surprised me: overwhelmingly glowing reports from current FTMs who had accessed treatment with or under Zucker as transgender youth. Often these reports were answers to posts asking about “the rumors” of reparative therapy. I was surprised, because I did not see ANY negative reports from FTMs at all, except for complaints about wait times for appointments.

Who are the three activists whose contributions to the “External Review” were anonymized by CAMH:

“First Name: LeeAndra
Last Name: Miller
Credentials: MA
Program Name: Psychotherapy Private Practice
City: Toronto
Specialties: Counsellor
Service Description: LeeAndra Miller M.A. has more than 20 years experience as a counsellor specializing in Arts based therapy and Individual psychotherapy for children, youth and adults. She has many years of experience working as a counsellor in LGBTTQ Services, Childrenís Mental Health as well as working with people who have experienced trauma. Through working for 10 years as a psychotherapist with queer and trans youth and young adults in the Pride & Prejudice program, she has developed a strong expertise working with people exploring gender identity and sexuality. LeeAndra is particularly skilled in the assessment and treatment of trauma survivors, designing and facilitating dynamic arts based groups, and playroom based therapy. She has a Masters degree in Expressive Arts Therapy from the European Graduate School, EGS. LeeAndra has a private practice where she utilizes both talk therapy and art based approaches to assist clients with their goals. She works within an anti-oppression framework and finds that the use of creativity can be highly effective and even transformational. LeeAndra is a Clinical member of the Ontario Society of Psychotherapists, OSP.”

“The EGS lacks academic accreditation from an accrediting agency that is recognized by the U.S. Council for Higher Education Accreditation. As a result, degrees from the EGS are not currently recognized by many state education authorities in the United States. The State of Texas currently includes the university on its published list of institutions that issue “fraudulent or substandard degrees” and notes that it is illegal to use an EGS degree to “obtain employment” within the state.[4] The State of Maine includes the EGS on its list of “Non-Accredited Colleges and Degree Mills.” [5] The State of Michigan Civil Service Commission states that degrees from the EGS “will not be accepted…to satisfy educational requirements indicated on job specifications.”[6]

I know about EGS. It isn’t a degree mill, but it definitely isn’t a traditional university, either. it’s not bunk, for sure, but it is alternative in format and style, and isn’t equivalent to normal training in a MA program. The students are doing independent work all year round except for a few weeks each year in which they travel to Switzerland and have classes there.

I think it’s actually a cool place, but for sure it is not alone going to be enough to give me confidence that a person is well trained in anything. I think it should really be more for supplementing other training.

Maybe the MSM in your country, but in Canada are you kidding! Even in the purportedly “right wing” MSM in Canada, they are transjacked. The National Post (called “right wing” in Canada) just “called out” the Washington Post over their coverage of a story of a “transman” who was shot because the Washington Post quoted the police using the victim’s sex as female which she was at the time of the incident reported. The National Post puts in a virtue signalling post-script about how they changed the pronouns to male from female because Trans.

Also note again, the link between trans and autism spectrum, another “population” which has been transed.

It is just awful what has happened to the Canadian mass media on this issue. Overnight there is simply no discussion, no questioning the almost daily presentation of transgender stories in a way that normalizes the notion that anyone can be the opposite sex if they say so, and/or want to undergo the surgery etc, and that anyone who questions this is a mean bigot. I truly fear for the future of women. I also resent being labeled a bigot because I refuse to deny biological reality.

I think it is interesting that the rise in the diagnosis of transgenderism coincides with the sharp decline in the diagnosis of dissociative disorders.

In the 90’s, a class action law-suit was successfully filed against incompetent psychologists/psychotherapists who were responsible for inducing “false memory syndrome” by asking vulnerable patients “leading questions.”

Doctors like Kenneth Zucker will inevitably be replaced by less experienced practitioners. As more gender questioning children and adolescents seek help, critical questions will likely go unaddressed – especially when the child presents as the sex that they identify with and the staff immediately validates this self-perception.The potential for errors in diagnostic evaluations would be very high in such an environment. It will be nearly impossible to distinguish a child who is highly dissociative from children who have other conditions that present with GID.

I hope that parents, re-transitioners and patients who have suffered as the result of medical negligence will speak out and organize to help prevent incompetent gender therapists and medical practitioners from harming children who seek care for GID and body/gender dysphoria. As patients who have desisted and re-transioned become more visible and vocal, they will discover that their stories line up in similar ways. This will help them to trace their way back to medical negligence and incompetent practitioners.

Heads will roll when the law-suits start.

One example of an adult who seems to be highly dissociative is this individual who identities as a 6 year old girl:

I cannot tell from the news accounts I have read (which is really all most of us have) whether Mr. Wolscht is dissociative, otherwise mentally ill, or merely an exhibitionist con-man. It is charitable (and hopefully accurate) to write his behavior off as mental illness, however difficult I may find that personally.

Wolscht is perfectly capable of acting like a full-grown adult male when it suits him (such as when he threatens to assault his detractors). He may be mentally ill, but I doubt the autopedophilia itself is anything other than a fetish.

In other news, a TERF cis man, who has been known to use complex trauma to convert brainwash children into heteronormative gender roles is fired for his blatant abuse of children and enforcing of sexist stereotypes.
Ancient but relevant article on TS Road Map about him. Who knew! Abuse kids and get fired! Huh. Strange.

Oh, no, no: TERF has always been neutral, nothing more than a mere descriptor!

Therefore, it’s obvious that Dr. Zucker is a radical feminist who fiercely defends women-only spaces from the intrusion of men in woman-costume.

Ha!

Seriously, though, “TERF” refers to a woman who, because she thinks the wrong thoughts, deserves male violence. It’s very rarely applied to men.

Dr. Zucker is an exception, I suppose, for having tried, in his own way, to protect confused children from the politics of disordered and perverse adults. I mean, they want to beat him and kill him, so calling him a “TERF” makes sense.

The full external review of the Child, Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic (CYF GIC) that the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) commissioned and released has recently been removed from the organization’s website. In its place is a six-page “executive summary” developed by CAMH.

The content of the review has come under suspicion since its release. The CAMH summary alludes to the possibility that some statements included in the initial review may be been “erroneous.” According to their website, CAMH has sent a formal letter of apology to Dr. Zucker.

The replacement of the report follows Zucker’s issue of a notice of libel against The Varsity for its coverage of the Gender Identity Clinic’s services winding down.

“Starting in middle school, Nic noticed something different about her relationships with girls she dated. She wasn’t attracted to them in the same way other boys were. It was more like she wanted to be around them, wanted to be them.”

Silence of the lambs?

AND

“She pulled out an old, black suitcase printed with pastel-colored sea creatures. She rummaged through her supplies – flattened cereal boxes, pipe cleaners, two-dozen kinds of glitter – and started decorating a cardboard box. She covered every edge and crack with neon paper and tape.”

I have a girly suitcase just like that, don’t you? It’s where I keep my tutu!

AND

“A few months ago, she avoided shaving the stubble on her face in preparation for a laser hair removal session. A child’s confused reaction sent her to the restaurant’s back cooler where she cried. She left work early that day.”

How the heck is this tolerated? Not sure how to go about reporting this as normally complaints are done at a regional police station. They wont take a complaint from citizens of another province. With all their abuses, how trannies have escaped being labelled as hate group escapes me. This dude is probably not even citizen and they could deport his sorry ass out of Canada without right of appeal if he had criminal charges.

I can’t stop loling at “Dreamboat”. Here’s a newsflash for you dude: no lesbian is going to have you, no matter what crazy delusional shit you call yourself. And dear goddess Dyke is not your name to appropriate, just get your filthy dick right off that.

Double plus: Isn’t Dreamboat usually a term associated with so-called “dreamy” guys? Never heard a lesbian use that term about herself or someone else she was attracted to.

Triple plus: lesbians, being females who are raised and socialized as women, and generally at least sub-consciously aware of the fucked up misogynistic world we live in, are probably not going to go around making murder threats against people we don’t like and/or our political opponents. We damn well know doing so would have horrible consequences for us personally as well as our communities and our political cause(s). Just one of the reasons why violence tends not to be our go-to resort whenever anything doesn’t go our way. It would be men who are overwhelmingly the violent ones, partly due to socialization, and partly due to living in a world where men routinely go unpunished for being extremely violent towards others, particularly those who are more oppressed than they are.

“(Zucker and his colleagues) think the activists’ claims about the clinic are unfounded, and argue that the controversy has more to do with adult agendas than with genuine concern for gender-dysphoric children and youth.”

I disagree with that. What you do absolutely makes you who you are, but what it doesn’t do is make you the opposite sex.

MTFs, for example, call themselves “women” but then act out in ways normally associated with men, particularly being aggressive, threatening, and violent toward women. And it’s especially important to point out this disgusting behavior given the trans community’s delusions that transitioning washes a man’s sins away and makes him above reproach. An MTF’s behavior determines who/what he is, not his meaningless identity.

Such a shit fight over on his twitter. He’s getting knocked about by the usual suspects, so he throws in a “terfs suck”, but they aren’t placated. Then feminists start taking objection to his insult, and he mocks them in retweets to demonstrate to the trans mob his true allegiance. But that doesn’t work either. In fact, he erases retweets because they offend his trans constituency, although not in response to feminist protests, natch. Meanwhile he’s being as conciliatory and – dare I say it? – grovelling to trans males assailing him on all sides. And still they come. While fuming about being misrepresented and maligned, it doesn’t for a second occur to him that the same thing could be happening to radical feminists for saying the exact things he happens to believe about gender/biology. It’s a good article but he’s got a loooooong way to go.

Sounds like great plan…carrying a child while on anti-rejection drugs. Nothing can possibly go wrong with that brilliant idea. Perfectly healthy and fertile women are already at higher risks of having babies with health issues when they pass forty. Apparently medecine has not solved that puzzle yet. Guess its not worth the effort …But eh, instead of focusing on simpler problems affecting millions of women, why not fuck some more with nature and encourage narcissistic freaks to have a go at fucking up not only their own body but those of children so they can validate their delusions. And we wont talk how ludicrous it is to throw some more resources at getting dudes pregnant when there is not enough to care for children of low incomes families who just need a bit of extra help for their education. Its not like we have bigger issues to deal with than the tranny laydeefeelz with the Zika virus epidemics. That affects only natural born women babies.

Freyja, the article was very misleading – the surgery being discussed was for women (REAL women) to be able to get a transplanted uterus. It’s only the tabloid website that took it in the direction of MtT being able to get pregnant. It’s simple clickbait, nothing more.

MtT are completely unable to understand that there are many processes and changes that happen in a woman’s body once pregnant that their male bodies simply won’t be able to replicate. Good grief, it’s not just a matter of having a uterus in one’s body! Only in the delusions of trannies would that be true.

“The transplant could be conducted on a woman ‘born without a uterus, or who had it removed or have uterine damage’ – this would make trans women eligible for the procedure.”

Nah, they’re bullshitting – of course following the mantra “transwomen are women”. Except that the women they refer are female, and this is only being offered to females because they have the correct anatomy such as actually having a uterine artery and ligaments to make the surgery possible.

So no, not real except in the fantasies of males that wish to co-opt all women’s experiences and even medical technologies developed for them.

No, a male and female’s hip bones are different. Women’s hipbones are tilted like a basket that can cradle a human’s head. Men’s hipbones go straight up & down and do not tilt at all. The uterus attaches directly to the bone and holds the child’s weight centered in a female human. A man’s hip bones are straight- tilted up, and the weight of a human fetus would cause his gut, kidneys to prolapse and cause possible intestinal damage. There is no basket to hold a growing fetus centered. The guy would look like he had a beer belly that migrated into his groin area.

Attaching the uterus to male hipbones would be off center causing permanent injury -or at best debilitating pain and would not prevent prolapse in to the groin area. A man’s hipbones would have to be artificially reconstructed into a woman’s, yet- after a procedure that that, it would not be able to hold the weight of a full term child without fracture. This sounds more like a man’s sexual fantasy to replace women as the gate keepers of giving birth.

The whole appeal of membership in a transformational belief system, whether transgenderism or Scientology or being born-again in any other way, is the sense of progressing into the embodiment of one’s better, higher self. In transgenderism the progression is landmarked by: committing to a transgender identity, declaring one’s new self to friends and loved ones, haircuts/wigs, going on hormones, modifying gestures, taking on a new name, tracking medical changes, surrounding oneself with fellow seekers and shunning doubters, monitoring vocalization, planning surgeries, etc etc. A million little goals and steps towards resolution. These markers can stretch out over a long period of time, many years, prolonging the experience of the butterfly emerging from the chrysalis. It’s the same for any transformational program. Progress is the goal.

The problem comes, and the reason people leave Scientology (or transgenderism or whatever) after fifteen years (or whenever) is when they’ve taken all the steps and they’ve done all the things or done a sufficient number of things and there’s nowhere else to go. This is why there’s a spike in suicides a few years after sex-change surgeries. It’s the feeling of potential transformation that is “therapeutic”. No different than buying a lottery ticket or putting your savings into a pyramid scheme. Same mechanism.

It’s no wonder men like Dr. Christine McGinn who have taken all the steps and have nowhere else to go except backwards need to invent imagined future steps towards the realization of their nonexistent goal. It’s the potential, not the obtainable, that provides. Progress is the goal.

A lot of trans and their apologists are keen on lying about the cotton ceiling though. They claim it’s a terf myth, a few seconds before they start complaining, yet again, about lesbians’ “exclusionary” sexuality.

“By closing the clinic, CAMH also walked away from a $1-million grant that had been awarded to Dr. Zucker and his team to study the effect of hormone blockers on teenagers. Those grants, in a country stingy with research dollars, are not easy to get.”

I wonder if these genderists got the bright idea that now’s the time to get away from “identity” completely. Now that more people, it seems, are catching on that Identity is not untouchable or sacred, but that it’s often the only thing standing (like a magical force-field) between a bad ideology and its critics.

Women health issues funding has been massively slashed in the past years in Canada. Just wondering what the Ontario taxpayers have to say about where their tax dollars go. Methink lesbians and het women have the same basic health issues. We are not competitioning to have resources affected to wildly different problems. Diverting fund from women health to waste it on trans political agenda is not helping any women. On the basis of providing absolutely no real value to actual real health issues, group like Rainbow Health should not be funded by the government. Mental health is also chronically underfunded on the most basic needs. People are on waiting list for years to access services if they cant pay private therapists. I guess Dr Zucker clinic was too good at solving gender issues without surgery and hormones. Sucks when you can provide a long term and effective solution not involving life long reliance on drugs.

I will cite as one glaring example of an issue of concerns for all women: the lack of research about how the vaginal wall absorb chemicals differently than skin, which makes it difficult to assess to what extent women are really exposed to them. It was found that hyeginic products have trace of pesticides due to the use of pesticides to grow cotton. Some of the nastiest pesticides are used for cotton because the products are not destined for human consumption. Some of them are planned to be phased out but its not reassuring to not know to what extent they are an issue for women exposed to them.

I am surprised at people here defending Zucker since he was dedicated to eliminating tomboy and butch behaviour in girls and ‘effeminate’ behaviour in boys.

The majority of children treated at the GIC (70%) were gender non conforming only (GNC Only) wth no symptoms of being transgender.

However they still got the SOCE like reparative therapy treatment to make them act straight. Even if they ended up being gay or lesbian they were going to be invisible ones.

One kid, brought in, 5 years of age, GNC Only and no symptoms of being transgender, 104 sessions with (feminine) toy removal…get this ..before assessment and reparative therapy comments on the notes.

So people here want to defend :LGB (or even straight) kds getting reparative therapy to make them act like ‘straight’ girls and boys?

I have no idea how a butch lesbian feminist could possibly defend actions to elimininate people like themselves from public view.
Make no mistake about it, they acted to elminate tomboy and butch behaviour.

You Gallusmag, if your parents had taken you there would have had to have gone through years of ‘therapy’ to make you a pretty litttle girl who likes dresses and barbies with nice long hair and who plays only ‘girls’ games.

I don’t see anyone here suggesting that enforcing sex stereotypes is a good thing. I see no one suggesting that children should be barred from the clothing and toys they enjoy (with the incredibly rare exception of possibly setting limits on behaviors that have become unhealthily obsessive or restrictive).

Lisa, I’ve observed your voluminous comments all over gender-critical, feminist, sexologist, and transgender blogs and news sites. Due to your psychiatric or neurological condition you are unable to participate meaningfully in these conversations. You are dishonest, and pull data out of studies you have not read, drawing conclusions not based on evidence. Frankly you don’t seem open to honest discourse psychologically. This dishonesty and lack of ethics joined with your inability to grasp complexity or nuance renders your input meaningless at best, distracting and trolling at worst. In short, you are a propagandist and self-hating autogynephile. I wish you luck but see no point in trying to accommodate you here, since you offer nothing and detract from a conversation you are ill-equipped to engage with. Good luck and take care.